Chapter 18 The Melt Line

March went out like a door opening, and the country began, in its own slow and enormous way, to release her. The first sign was the crust. There is a week in the high north, most years, when the days go above freezing and the surface snow melts into slush and then the night comes back and freezes that slush to a hard shell, and for a few days the whole country becomes walkable in a way it never is, snow that will carry a grown woman and a sled on the top of it like a floor laid over the world. It is a gift with a window in it, and the window closes when the melt goes all the way through and the world turns to rotten slush and water, and a person who wastes the crust waits another year. She had been waiting for the crust since February and she was ready for it in the only way that mattered, which was that she had been thinking about it every day, and the thought had kept her alive. She spent the last two weeks of March making ready. She built a sled from the last sheet of aluminum she tore off the aircraft's wing and the cord and the poles, long and narrow, with runners she smoothed and greased with a smear of the moose fat and set with pegs, and she loaded and unloaded it a dozen times in the clearing until the load sat right and the lashing held. She made a food bag she could reach without untying the sled. She went over the map with the pencil and traced the way down, the Nakwasin to the confluence and down the main stem to Talvosk, ninety kilometers as the crow flew and more as the river ran, and she put her thumb on the distance and made herself believe it, because a person who does not believe the number does not plan for the days, and the days were twelve, at eight kilometers a day, which was a number she had picked out of the air and which she would live or die by. She packed what she could not replace. The ferro rod and the lighter in two places on her body. The knife and the hatchet. The pot. The compass and the map, in an oilcloth inside her jacket, so that if she lost the sled she would still have the map and if she lost the map she would still have the river, which ran one way and one way only and was, in the end, the whole direction of the world. Food for six days, and the wire to snare on the way, and the fish hooks, and the moose fat, and her log, wrapped in a scrap of the tarp, because the log was the one thing she had made that winter that was hers, and she carried it the way you carry a passport. The body that would carry it was not the body that had walked out of the Bluewing office in October. She had put the winter on and taken it off again, and what was left was spare and hard and light, and it tired now in a way that had nothing to do with the old tiredness, a fuel-empty tiredness that came on suddenly and had to be sat down and waited out. So she made the plan in the shape of its worst hour. She picked her camps before she ever left, one a day, each with spruce for boughs and a creek for water, and she drew them on the map in pencil and numbered them, and she wrote beside the numbers the rule this country had taught her the hard way, which was that a plan is not a promise to the weather; it is a way of knowing exactly how and when the weather has broken it. She said goodbye to the cabin on the fourth of April, and she did it properly, because she had learned to do things properly and because she was no longer sure she would ever see it again. She swept the floor. She stacked the last of the wood by the stove for whoever came next, and she left the pot and the tin cup on the bench and half the render in the coffee can and a hare frozen in the cache, and she left a note on the bench in the pencil, and the note said: Claim cabin. Stove works. Water at creek. I went down the Nakwasin. Whoever you are, thank you, and you can have the rest. She did not sign it. She had a name and she had decided that the valley did not get to have it, which was a small and spiteful and entirely necessary decision, and she left the cabin and she barred the door from the outside with the pole and she put on her snowshoes and took up the sled's rope and started down the trail to the bar. The crust held her all that first day like a road built for her in the night. She went the four kilometers to the bar in an hour and a half, her own old trail a furrow beside her, and she stopped at the wreck and stood over it a while. The Whimbrel had gone under the ice and the ice had gone grey and rotten and there was a wing tip showing through, painted with a bird that did not look like anything with a spine, and the slough around it was open water in the sun and black, and the river was running under the ice and you could hear it, a low blue voice. She had spent her whole winter within sight of this machine and she had thought, in the fall, that it was her signal and her hope, and now it was just a wreck in a slough, and she said nothing to it, and she did not look back at it when she left it, though she would remember the pale bird on the wing tip every time she thought of that valley for the rest of her life. She camped that first night at the south end of Oolamut on a bed of boughs over the crust, with a fire and the lake booming out in the dark and the wolves howling somewhere north, and she lay on her back and looked at the stars come out over the ridge and she was, for the first time in five months, not at home and not in danger and not waiting, and she could not name the feeling and then she could, and the name was that she was leaving. She was leaving, and a part of her did not want to, and that part of her had a face and no face and no name, and it stood on the bank of the lake in the dark and watched her go, or it did not, and she would never know, and she slept. She found the first marked stick on the second morning, three kilometers down the river, driven into the ice at the edge of the channel and leaning slightly upstream, and it had a notch cut in its top. ---